You are not other peoples opinion of you. You are not who they tell you are. You are not your number of likes or followers. In fact, if you fall in love with the (social media) loves, you’re gonna break with the hate. Fact.
Your character matters. Character, as Os Guinness so wonderfully defined it, is simply who you are when no one sees. You, most likely, know the characters around you more than you know yourself. With that in mind, you could benefit from reading Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchick’s masterpiece, Lonely Man of Faith. The Bible, I believe you can never read enough. Anything Solzhenitsyn put to paper, yes please. Immanuel Kant, C.S. Lewis, Kierkegaard, Viktor Frankl, Dorothy Sayer, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Tim Keller, and put a bow on it with Augustine’s classic Confessions. Read and reflect on ancient truths. Pay little attention to bullshit influencers and peeps you’ve never met on Tickytocky, fakebook, or instatiltyourself.
Your character matters, friend. You are not who you think you are. Nope you’re not. You are what you repeatedly do (thanks Aristotle). Too many today are doom scrolling and depressed. Too distracted to slow down and self observe, much less self improve. So, get busy working on the one person you can improve. If you want an easy start to the hard road within, check out David Brooks rant titled, The Road to Character. In this baby you’ll get a taste of all the authors mentioned above. Once you’re on the road, you can always pull over to berm and grab some Guinness (Os, that is) and go deeper.
Your reputation is not who you are. STOP all the fuss about what others think about you. Get the f$@# off social media, and get busy becoming a character worth seeing and emulating. Grab a friends hand and give and take care. A few friends (real ones), not tens of thousands virtual ones, are the road to transforming together. Together we transform. Always together. Where, friend, is your focus. Focus on yourself. Focus on your few. You’ve been reminded.
Live hard. Love harder…
BUILT TO LEAD 